In a world with an intellectual history of seven thousand years behind it, where do Pakistanis stand, what are they doing, what do they aspire to be, and what ought they to be doing? This Blog takes Notes of all of that ...

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

How to protect citizens from their killer governments

So Immanuel
Kant already knew it!

See
this article published in The News York Times on September 13, 2013.

TORONTO
— PRESIDENT OBAMA’S failure to get Congress to support airstrikes in Syria,
coupled with the vote against military action in the British House of Commons,
brings home a key fact about international politics: when given a choice,
democratic peoples are reluctant to authorize their leaders to use force to
protect civilians in countries far away.

In
2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, on
which I served, developed the idea that all states, but especially democracies,
have a “responsibility to protect” civilians when they are threatened with mass
killing. For those of us who have worked hard to promote this concept, it’s
obvious that our idea is facing a crisis of democratic legitimacy.

Let’s
be clear what the problem is: it’s not just compassion fatigue, isolationism or
disengagement from the world. It’s more than war weariness or sorrow at the
human and financial cost of intervention. It goes beyond disillusion at the
failures to build stability in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.

The
core problem is public anger at the manipulation of consent: disillusion with
the way in which leaders and policy elites have used moral and humanitarian
arguments to extract popular support for the use of force in Iraq and Libya,
and then conducted those interventions in ways that betrayed their lack of true
commitment to those principles. To quote the Who, the people are saying they
“won’t get fooled again.”

Rebuilding
popular democratic support for the idea of our duty to protect civilians, when
no one else can or will, is a critical challenge in the years ahead.

The
first step is to re-emphasize that protecting civilians is about preventing
harm, not primarily using force. The public knows an ounce of prevention is
worth a pound of cure. It has no major problem with conflict resolution,
foreign assistance, law and order training, or any of the other elements of
prevention.

The
real challenge comes when prevention fails, when force becomes the last resort.
Here the public’s problem is mission creep, the way protection of civilians
morphs into regime change. Many people who were prepared to stop Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi’s slaughtering of civilians in Benghazi grew increasingly uneasy
when that mandate was used to bomb Tripoli. We need to make sure that the
military puts civilian protection first and last as its sole legitimate
purpose.

The
third challenge, most difficult of all, is how to protect civilians when the
Security Council blocks the use of force. For all the talk about American
exceptionalism, the American people don’t like using force if the United
Nations is against it, and they are uneasy if allies won’t stand with them.

The
reality, however, is that if the United States wants to stop atrocity crimes,
it may have to go it alone. With Syria, the United States’ threat of force has
played a role in the diplomatic breakthrough involving Russia that just might
protect civilians against further use of chemical weapons. If there are rare
cases like this where the threat of force may be “illegal but legitimate” (as
an international commission on Kosovo called the NATO bombing), the American
people want to know how to keep the use of force from getting out of control.

This
is why President Obama’s decision — and Prime Minister David Cameron’s, too —
to seek democratic authorization for the use of force was the right way to go,
even though it hasn’t turned out the way they wanted.

As
they’ve both discovered, when you go to your legislature for authorization,
there is a price to pay. When democracy becomes the venue for testing the
legitimacy of force, the bar of justification is set high. Democratic
legitimacy is not a substitute for international legality, but it performs one
of the crucial functions of law, which is to subject the use of force to strict
control.

Democratic
consent, of course, can be manipulated, as it was over Iraq in 2003. But when
it is, democratic peoples have learned from the experience and have raised the
bar higher.

Their
reluctance to use force is not a passing phenomenon. Immanuel Kant was right
that when the people bear the cost of war and get a chance to tell their
leaders what they think, they are reluctant to authorize it.

Still,
it is critical that they be willing, in the right circumstances, to do so. In
the future, the Security Council may be deadlocked about intervening, and
presidents and prime ministers will have to turn instead to their people for
permission to save civilians. If the case for action is made honestly, if no
one’s consent is manipulated, let’s hope the people say yes. We can’t fight
genocide, ethnic cleansing and chemical weapons attacks unless they do.

[Michael
Ignatieff is a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard and at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.]

The Blogger

The blogger cherishes a cosmopolitan spirit; he is a moralist; a rationalist; a philosopher; a political philosopher; he believes in Classical Liberalism, as a Theory of Conduct.
He has substantially contributed to the founding of the first free market think tank of Pakistan, Alternate Solutions Institute.
He is a writer who wrote / published dozens of articles on a variety of issues, and is author of 4 books.
He wrote / published short-stories in Punjabi, a regional language of Pakistan.
He composes poetry both in Urdu and Punjabi, and has already published one collection.